OT: Amazon's Kindle - The Equivalent of a Nazi Crematorium?
Thanatos
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-kaufman/google-books-and-kindles_b_380
536.html
Google Books And Kindles: A Concentration Camp Of Ideas
Alan Kaufman
San Francisco poet and author
When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of
crematoria lit. And when I hear the term "hi-tech" I think not of
helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed
rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between
1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient
ways the mass murder of six million of my people. The instruments of
so-called progress, placed in the hands of the modern state, disappeared
six million Jewish men, women and children, into a void from which they
will never return and in which a majority of them remain forever
unidentified. This was done in the name of progress by means of
technology for the creation of a better world.
The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists
working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern
technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old
religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of
progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis,
like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred
towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that
simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way.
And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a
propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag
on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and
then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through
ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological
means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi
Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were
not put on trial.
The victorious Allies did not mandate that technology, which had been
turned to such murderous ends, must pass an ethical standard review from
an international body, like a UN of technology. No such body of decision
came about. To the contrary, even while the war crime trials of Nazi
chieftains were in session, American and Soviet governments were
recruiting high-level Nazis to their intelligence services, military
armaments industries, and space programs. So that, while in
jurisprudence terms Nazi social and political values were delivered a
blow, the Nazi fascination with technology merged seamlessly with that
of their conquerors: us.
That is why today we drive Volkswagens, which were invented by Hitler,
and use space heaters from companies that may once have manufactured
crematoria and why Werner Von Braun, the Nazi father of the V-2 rocket
became an American space pioneer hero studied in public schools. Nazi
Technology and corporate methodology was folded handily into American
feel-good Capitalist culture. That is the very point of the brilliant
satire, "Dr. Strangelove".
So that now, sixty four years after the Holocaust, the Nazi disdain for
the book has become the feel-good Hi-Tech campaign to rid the world of
books in place of massive easily controlled centralized repositories of
book texts downloadable on little hand-held devices and from which a
text can be dissapeared with the click of a mouse: in Nazi terms, a
dream come true.
How grave was Nazi contempt for books? As response to the book burnings
in Germany, in the May 11, 1933 issue of Chicago's Daily Worker, (and
years before the first fully operational death camps opened their
furnace doors), a grim cartoon entitled "Altars of the Nazis" portrayed
two smoking crematoria of equal size, placed side by side, one marked
"Nazi Victims" and the other "Condemned Books". The link between
contempt for books and mass murder could not be more clear.
President Roosevelt, recognizing the threat of Nazi attitudes to the
book, launched a full-scale government campaign, and declaring it part
of the national war effort, said: "...books...embody man's eternal fight
against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons."
In World War II, people died to produce and protect books. Anti-Fascist
organizations, American Jewish Groups and writers, editors and
journalists launched massive demonstrations in defense of the book,
including, on March 10, 1933, the largest march, to that date, in the
history of New York City: 100,000 people turned out to express outrage
at the burning of books and other events in Germany. In its coverage of
the Berlin book burnings, Newsweek used "Holocaust" as its headline.
Today's hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering,
space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without.
In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.
The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with
Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a
kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every
examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity
is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in
authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This
death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I
hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of
crematoria lit.
Ron Capik
> Isn't this guy taking things just a bit too far?
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-kaufman/google-books-and-kindles_b_380
> 536.html
>
> Google Books And Kindles: A Concentration Camp Of Ideas
> Alan Kaufman
> San Francisco poet and author
>
Wow, you've hit Godwin's Law [reductio ad Hitlerum ]
in the subject line. This may be a record of sorts. ;-)
That in mind, yes, he may be stretching things.
Later...
Ron Capik
--
JRStern
>Isn't this guy taking things just a bit too far?
I think that's what he does for a living!
I mean, I too think the Kindle is silly, but come on now.
Just load the books onto a laptop/netbook and scrap the Kindle.
J.
Anim8rFSK
JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote:
Why? The kindle is a fraction of the size and cost, and the battery
lasts forever between charges.
--
Happy 30th Anniversary
STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE
http://www.onedigitallife.com/images/star-trek-the-motion-picture.jpg
"The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning"
Thanatos
Anim8rFSK <ANIM...@cox.net> wrote:
> In article <3n9rh59oputbs30nf...@4ax.com>,
> JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:30:01 -0500, Thanatos <atr...@mac.com> wrote:
> >
> > >Isn't this guy taking things just a bit too far?
> >
> > I think that's what he does for a living!
> >
> > I mean, I too think the Kindle is silly, but come on now.
> >
> > Just load the books onto a laptop/netbook and scrap the Kindle.
>
> Why? The kindle is a fraction of the size and cost, and the battery
> lasts forever between charges.
I think he was addressing the issue brought up in the article that some
great corporate Big Brother can just "disappear" the books on your
Kindle at their whim and if you copy them over to a laptop, that can't
happen.
Anim8rFSK
Thanatos <atr...@mac.com> wrote:
Ah, k, I saved the article but haven't read it yet.
JRStern
>I think he was addressing the issue brought up in the article that some
>great corporate Big Brother can just "disappear" the books on your
>Kindle at their whim and if you copy them over to a laptop, that can't
>happen.
Depends on the software.
My criticism is about Kindle as a device.
Amazon has already admitted it was a stupid move on their part to
delete, um, I forget what the book was, what the story was.
Intellectual property rights management is messy stuff, at best.
J.
Thanatos
JRStern <JRS...@foobar.invalid> wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:00:15 -0500, Thanatos <atr...@mac.com> wrote:
>
> >I think he was addressing the issue brought up in the article that some
> >great corporate Big Brother can just "disappear" the books on your
> >Kindle at their whim and if you copy them over to a laptop, that can't
> >happen.
>
> Depends on the software.
>
> My criticism is about Kindle as a device.
>
> Amazon has already admitted it was a stupid move on their part to
> delete, um, I forget what the book was, what the story was.
Ironically, the book they deleted was "1984".